Comments on: Making blogs better: categories and straplines

By: Jenny Woolf

Jenny Woolf — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:23:54 +0000

I like the tagline "banter between travellers...." etc because that gives the impression that anyone reading it will get "real" rather than "wannabe" content.

By: Vivienne Boucher

Vivienne Boucher — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:11:06 +0000

Jeremy, you've identified a great niche. Like others I like the 3rd but prefer your 4th suggestion for a strapline; but I also like the idea of interaction hinted at in your use of the word 'connected'. So my suggestion would be Travelblather - connecting travelwriters, prs and travel cos, or even 'connecting content for(or debate for) travel professionals'. You'll like Wordpress, it's what I use, and the category and tag cloud features automatically highlight the categories and topics you write about most frequently, as long as you take care to categorize and define key words for every post. I've been trying to decide about a further explanatory strapline for my blog - and was thinking of using 'of tourism and the visitor economy' so if you have any thoughts, or other comments, I'd welcome them. PS I think that the whole topic of monetisation is something that's of particular interest within the community you're addressing, hence the success and popularity of Simonseeks.com.

By: Darren Cronian

Darren Cronian — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:32:32 +0000

One letter category titles are useless. Type in 'air travel news' in Google UK. Through the bad weather that category got A LOT of traffic, so do not rule out categories. Tags on the other hand I don't use on TR, but I do on my Leeds site - I "nofollow" the tags though because I only want them to be used by the readers to aid searching.

By: Darren Cronian

Darren Cronian — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:29:28 +0000

Jeremy, categories are good for internal linking, which helps the posts rank better, so they do help SEO. If you do your reearch and find search terms that are useful to the reader and also what people use to find your topic of content then they can drive a lot of traffic.

On my categories I have extracts of the posts, rather than the full post. This is because the category, archive and homepage can get caught up in duplicate content issues, and you'll find Google especially will filter any pages out it thinks is a duplicate.

I use a tool called Market Samarui, you can get it as a free trial, but when the trial has finished the keyword research tool is free and takes Google trends, adwords data in too.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:24:38 +0000

Yes, Americans definitely use "banter" enough to get it in this context, but I agree with another commentator that it doesn't help you at all with SEO.

The title you choose is really, really important, so you want to make each word count. You also want it to be something a person would type in Google.

Example: For GoBackpacking.com I use "The best around the world travel blog"

"Blather" sounds like something a Brit would say.